ABSTRACT
The late Mr George Gissing's posthumous romance of the age of Justinian is prefaced by an introduction from Mr Frederic Harrison, in which he expresses a judgment of the book from which we cannot too emphatically dissent:-
This is the sort of thing that makes us despair of serious English criticism. Mr Harrison is the only survivor of our veteran leaders in that branch ofliterature, now that Sir Leslie Stephen has gone; and for him to set this judgment on record about a novelist like Gissing, whose principal works he admits that he has either not read or cannot appreciate, is to put himselfon a level no higher than that of the professional writer of advertisements. To say of Gissing that Veranilda is his 'best and most original work', is about as true as that Mr Harrison's own masterpiece is Theophano. Either statement misses the whole point ofthe talent of the writer in each case. It was bad enough that the leaders of criticism should have neglected Gissing in his lifetime; but this effusive misrepresentation ofhis genius now that he is dead is astill more deplorable demonstration of their inability to appreciate his real place in the imaginative literature ofthe last quarter ofnineteenth-century England.
